Yes, you can easily hop over to YouTube and find professional shooters with tuned competition pistols that can shoot as fast as what you’ll see in the brief video below. You aren’t likely to find an average shooter (in this instance, an engineer) who can shoot a .45 ACP this fast—9 shots/second—with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Some AK variants shoot slower than this (≤8 shots/second) on full-auto.

Here’s how the company framed the scene to us, which occurred during part of a testing sequence that put 14,000 rounds through this pistol frame in less than a week.

The video is of a Detonics 1911 (MTX) double-stacked 10-round magazine shooting 45 ACP white box ammo.

Detonics was conducting endurance testing, with this phase of the test examining tactical suppression rate of fire. Tactical suppression rate of fire examined a) the speed to discharge all 10 rounds and b) the muzzle rise while rapid-firing. The gun was a standard (single action) Detonics MTX, 6-8 pound trigger, no tuning – shooting a rate of 9 rounds per second. The ammo was white box 45 ACP.

In the interests of a roughly apples-to-apples comparison, here’s a random YouTube of an average shooter rapid-firing a stock Kimber 1911 (below).

We’re talked in the past about the Detonics Defense MTX (standard)/STX(striker-fired) family of modular pistols that we think is a serious contender in the U.S. Army’s Modular Handgun System (MHS) competition, even though the program itself won’t be official addressed until next Tuesday (July 29) in an industry day event.

The Detonics design offers the military the .45 ACP cartridge that they’d like to return to with a double-stack magazines, the modularity to mix-and-match among officer, commander, and full-size frames and top-ends, and the ability to use either a traditional 1911 single-action top-end (MTX), or a new striker-fired upper (STX).  The upper sits on top of an advanced, low bore axis recoil-eating grip that holds a double-stack .45 magazine that is still as thin as a single stack 1911, all on a metal-frame (which the military prefers over polymer for durability reasons), that has very little muzzle flip and felt recoil.

The MTX upper isn’t anything more than a very well-executed standard 1911 upper, though the patent-holding striker-fired upper is an interesting prototype. What sets the pistol apart is a modular frame system that meets the government’s anthropometric key performance parameters, with single weapon system that can transition in minutes between a full size upper and a double stack full size grip, to a compact upper and compact double stack grip.